“Genre seems so dated in a way,” she elaborates later. “It’s a weird thing for us because we do want to be a successful band, so there’s a weird line that we have to walk. We don’t want to be pop stars. We want to be the best possible version of Potty Mouth, and the most accessible version of Potty Mouth. We still don’t really know what that is, but I don’t see it as a bad thing. We just want to be successful, and we want people to hear our music, so we’re not going to keep it in the basement just because we want to stay ‘punks’ or just want to appeal to punks.”
“Punk ethos in practice is intensely hypocritical,” says Einbinder. “I don’t see the binary of pop and rock to be a useful one. I think it’s really limiting to think of music that way… I think that to position pop as secondary, lesser than rock music, is in a lot of ways reproducing the same meanings of the gender binary hierarchy. Rock has more associations with masculinity and all the values therein, whereas pop tends to be more associated with femininity.”
Those perceptions present an illusory choice for many bands, but Einbinder challenges the value of broad genre categorization, which she views as minimizing all the common ground between the two. “As for genre categories describing sound, [pop and rock are] two of the broadest categories that you could possibly come up with. It’s so watered down in that sense. A lot of rock music is pop music, and a lot of pop music is rock music. I still think that being anti-pop is stupid, because even the people who think they’re the most politically radical punks don’t live outside the dominant culture. They exist within it.”
Potty Mouth has plenty of experience with the ups and downs of the DIY-or-bust mentality that Einbinder references. Though that kind of scrappiness helped contribute to the band’s development in earlier years, she’s now disillusioned with the expectations that she sees the movement placing on the very bands that it creates and supports.
“It carries with it this assumption that if you’re not a punk band in the punk subculture, that you can’t have the same ideas and ethics and values that that subculture purports to have,” she says. “Punk subculture purports to be anti-racist, anti-sexist… I hate the idea of selling out, because what does that even mean? You can still be a band that has [those] values and ethics and puts those values and ideas and ethics into practice to achieve career success.”
Highlighting the distinctions between Potty Mouth’s internal philosophy and the meaning of its music has been an unexpected source of frustration in the past. Though the band’s sound has a clear punk inflection, Weems’ lyrics mainly deal with relationships and identity, and were never intended as commentary on a larger scale. Even at the band’s heaviest moments, there’s always something lighthearted about it. Weems makes faces behind the mic, Einbinder bounces around the room while firing off bass riffs, and the trio replaces the chorus of “Cherry Picking” by chanting “I want my white wine!” If Potty Mouth is representative of any statement, it’s the idea that a band can engage deeply with a personal philosophy while making music that isn’t a constant declaration of its values.
Embracing both aspects equally has helped guide the group’s development, especially when evaluating career-altering business and creative decisions. Recently, while shooting a music video in L.A., the band reworked part of the artistic concept on the spot upon discovering that a videographer planned to incorporate a compilation of explosions and dropping bombs.
“We saw it and were like ‘Okay, some of this is cool, and some of this is war-reminiscent and very violent’,” says Einbinder. “It was hard to talk about it because there were a lot of people in the room, but we stepped out into the hallway and talked about it and were like ‘Yeah, we can’t use this footage because it’s just really violent, and it’s a privilege to look at this imagery and use it as art and not take it seriously… I think for us, as a group and as individuals, we’re always talking about our values and practices and consciousness and communication. This kind of work is happening all the time on a microscopic, day-to-day level.”
“Everyone’s contributing to society’s bullshit in some way,” says Weems. “It’s better to think about how you can change it instead of taking each other out for it.”
Catch Potty Mouth tomorrow night (3/5) at ONCE Somerville, along with Charming Disaster and Puppy Problems. Tickets are still available.